Mowing Down Greenhouse Gases

Global warming finally captured mainstream news headlines last week when reality star President Trump declared he would pull the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. While withdrawing from the agreement will have negative environmental and economic ramifications that won't manifest themselves for years, maybe even decades, I won't pretend to be surprised by this turn events, just like I wasn't surprised by the Dakota Access Pipeline getting rammed through. I've long believed that any meaningful action to curb global warming would come from the private sector and local efforts.

To that end, it's been encouraging to see cities like Pittsburgh pledge to go 100% renewable, and cities like Oakland block the construction of coal terminals in their ports, largely thanks to pressure from local groups. Similarly, municipalities, academic institutions, and churches have been divesting from the fossil fuel industry. All of these efforts began well before Trump became president and can continue despite his efforts to gut environmental regulations.

My electric, mulching mower has a
lot of miles on it...for good reason

As individuals, we have little control of federal legislation, but we can take individual efforts and band together to put pressure on businesses and local governments.

One avenue that I feel has been overlooked is a simple one: mulching our lawns instead of bagging out the grass clippings. I know, I know, it sounds sort of stupid, but hear me out.

An Annotated Bibliography for Science Fiction and Climate Change

So, I just finalized a magazine article I've been working on for the last couple of weeks called "Can SF Save the World From Climate Change?" Hopefully, the article will be coming to a science fiction magazine near you soon, but seeing as how my research led me to some great reading material on the subject, I figured it'd be helpful to share my sources here and now. Below you'll find the annotated bibliography I included with my article, everything from the most up-to-date prognosis on our planet to the newest trends in literature dealing with climate change. I'd like to give a very special thanks to Bill McKibben of 350.org for taking the time to provide me with some of these great resources and for weighing in on the idea of SF inspiring creative solutions for dealing with climate change. Likewise, I'd also like to give a special thanks to John DeNardo of SF Signal. Thanks, gentlemen!

Climate Change: The Reality of the Situation

McKibben, Bill. “The Reckoning.” Rolling Stone. Issue 1162, August 2012. The popular article that drove home the notion that we’re already experiencing the effects of global warming. In addition to laying out the

Terrorism, Climate Change, Mass Hysteria – This is Why I Write Spec-Fic

In his personal essay, “Almost California,” Chuck Palahniuk says, “That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version.” As a teacher, I make all my creative non-fiction students read this essay because I think it poignantly defines what autobiographical writing is all about. As a writer, I take this idea a step further and ask myself: why do I write spec-fiction? Hell, why do I write at all?

In the summer of 2010 I worked on a clean-up barge in response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As I wrote here on this blog afterward, it was a highly frustrating experience—my hunch that the clean-up vessels were being chased off so BP could sink the oil into the ocean, thereby avoiding damaging photo ops, turned out to be right on—and I was newly inspired as a writer. In my own words, “I (re)adopted the strategy of trying to write stories with relevance to the real world...”

Curbing the Apocalypse

Back in September of last year I wrote a post on climate change and complained about there being a lack of good speculative fiction dealing with the issue. My friend and frequent collaborator, Ahimsa Kerp, politely suggested I read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (it only won the Hugo and Nebula awards—how could I possibly have known about it?). The book is set in the near future when the global oil supply is for all intents and purposes gone, and rising temperatures have resulted in higher sea levels and a global food crisis. Huge agricultural corporations hold the world hostage with their genetically altered seed supplies, and combat independent nations with designer pests and blights.


When you consider the mounting evidence of climate change and hear more and more about real-life corporations like Monsanto snuffing out local farmers to gain a monopoly on the world's seed supply, Bacigalupi's vision seems awfully prescient. Reading this great novel, along with having recently read Bill McKibben's Eaarth and State of the World by the non-profit World Watch Institute, I can't help but feel a greater urgency to make changes in how we live—to try and save the world from ecological disaster, or if nothing else, be more prepared when the apocalypse does arrive. So, without further ado, I present to you:

How to be Self-reliant and Environmentally Responsible (without being a pussy or dirty hippy, not that there there's nothing wrong with that...)

Fahrenheit 2011

It's September again, and for me that means back to teaching. Among the six classes I'm teaching this year, two of them are noteworthy—two classes that at first glance might seem unrelated, but to my mind are inextricably linked. The first is a dystopian literature course at the Orange County High School of the Arts. The second is a composition course at Chapman University, writing about ecology, in which we are reading extensively about the impact of climate change.

Amazingly, people the world over seem to think global warming is still a theory under debate, or worse, that it's a hoax. Let me be clear, there is no debate. This is no hoax. The data is overwhelming. There is no argument within the scientific community whether global warming is real. The only discussion is how bad will it get, and how can we curtail the damage.